Understanding Your Target Audience for Landing Pages

What’s more important, traffic or conversions? If you get 50,000 visitors from a random tractor repair website and 500 visitors from an industry magazine that covers the specific market you’re in, which one is going to be better for your business?

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Unless you’re in the pageview business, what you should first and foremost care about is conversions. Conversions take place when targeted traffic meets a relevant offer. It all starts with knowing who your target audience is and what they need or want. So – if you want to boost your landing page (and overall) conversions, you need to do the following.

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Really get to know your target audience

Conduct surveys and interviews to understand your customer’s pain points. You want them to opt-in to your email list, so what could you offer that would make them want to subscribe? Instead of making guesses, talk to people! You’ll be surprised by how much you will learn – and how useful it will be.

If you know…

who the people are, you know how to get to them (the blogs they read, the sites they visit, the stuff they search in Google etc);

how they describe the type of services they offer, you can word the copy on your site to match the conversation in their heads (very important!);

how they choose and compare products in your industry, you know how to structure and prioritize content on your site;

what they want, your value proposition can state exactly that and the whole site can be 98% relevant to them;

what they don’t care about, you can dismiss and cut it out from the site content;

how their life is better thanks to your service, you know which end-benefits to communicate.

… and so on and so forth. It’s all about relevancy – if what you offer and how you present it matches their state of mind, you have gained a customer.

If your customer is “everybody”, you’re making it extremely difficult for yourself – nobody will identify with “everybody”. One of the biggest problems I see with landing pages is that the page has no understanding of who the visitor is, what they want and why.

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If you already have subscribers and/or customers, survey them

The best thing you can do with subscribers is to survey them. What you want is to get in the heads of your customers, learn what they need. The goal here is to learn what you should offer as a lead magnet to entice them to opt-in. Survey responses will be very insightful about this.

I recommend asking the following questions (adjust the wording as you see fit):

What can you tell us about yourself? Get the demographical data and see if there are any trends (e.g. generational). If you’ve got a B2B business, ask about their industry and position in the company (and who makes the decision!)

If you could ask just 1 question from the top [your industry] guru / researcher, what would it be?

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Tips for the survey

If you can, keep it short: the more questions, the fewer responders and poorer quality responses. Once you list your questions, then weed them out.

Make sure the information you collect is actionable – don’t ask questions just because you’re curious. Once you have written your questions, go through them and ask yourself: “What am I going to do with this information once I have it?” Make sure each question contributes something unique and is necessary.

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If you’re just getting started and have no subscribers yet

If you have no paying customers yet, you’re dealing with assumptions and educated guesses based on your first-hand experience and anecdotal evidence.

Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and their needs. The data you need to know depends on the product and whether you have a B2B or B2C business.

This approach, however, is not very helpful. Online the location matters much less (if at all). Age is not what it used to be – fifty-year-olds get just as excited about new tech gadgets as twenty-somethings, and 30-year-olds may still be living with their parents. More than demographic data, you want to look at the lifestyle.

You want to have answers to these questions:

Who are the target customers? Describe their life (or business) situation

Which problem are they solving for themselves? What’s the pain?

What are their needs that aren’t being met?

Assumptions to these questions will help you come up with a better offer – a better lead magnet.

Remember, conversions take place when targeted traffic meets a relevant offer. So your job as a marketer is to figure out how to make your landing page content relevant to your audience. Relevancy leads to sales.

Use the findings from talking to people and surveys to write the copy on your site. When your target audience arrives to your site, looks at the content and goes “Hey, this is exactly what I’m looking for”, you nailed it.

Put your marketing knowledge into action. Get automated, and get more customers!